Dr. Alexander Loui
Kodak Research Labs
Eastman Kodak Company
Rochester, NY

KHE225, Kerr Hall East
340 Church Street
Ryerson University
Toronto  map

The proliferation of mobile multimedia devices and social networks has lead to an explosion in the amount of digital media content being created, resulting in large personal and public multimedia databases in which it has become increasingly difficult to retrieve specific content and browse the large collections. In the absence of manual annotation specifying the content of the media (in the form of captions or tags), most current content management software only allow simple browsing and navigation options; which severely limits the search and other advanced functionality. Our research is focused on semantic content analysis and indexing technologies to enable easy browsing, searching, composing, and sharing of content and personal memories. In this talk, I will describe some recent work on semantic event detection and image value indexing. We propose a novel semantic event detection approach by considering an event-level Bag-of- Features (BOF) representation to model typical consumer events. Based on this BOF representation, semantic events are detected in a concept space instead of the original low-level visual feature space. There are two advantages to our approach: we can avoid the sensitivity problem by decreasing the influence of difficult or erroneous images or videos in measuring event-level similarity; also we can utilize the power of higher-level concept scores in describing semantic events. The ability to automatically assess image characteristics is another important function for content management, building image albums, storytelling with images, and retrieval of specific visual content. This capability is needed to organize and sort large numbers of image and video assets. We proposes a novel approach to assess and rate images based on multidimensional characteristics including image quality, social relationships, aesthetic quality, important events, and usage. This new approach provides additional flexibility for end user applications that utilize different aspects of image characteristics. Specifically, we describe a method for assessing image quality based upon technical characteristics of the image, and for predicting the significance of an image based upon the people portrayed in the image.

Alexander C. Loui obtained his B.A.Sc. (Honors), M.A.Sc, and Ph.D. all in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, Canada. In 1990, he joined Bellcore as a Member of Technical Staff working on audiovisual compression and VOD technologies. He joined Kodak Research Labs in 1996. Since then he has led and contributed to pioneering research on digital image management including event detection, auto-albuming algorithms, and multimedia composition systems. His research interests span the areas of semantic content understanding, multimedia indexing and retrieval, intelligent systems, and video communications. He has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, and SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging. He was Chair of the Rochester Chapter of IEEE Signal Processing Society for 2005. He has been the Treasurer of the IEEE Rochester Section since 2007. He is a Kodak Distinguished Inventor (with over 50 granted and pending patents), and a Fellow of IEEE "for contributions to digital image content management systems."